Kyung-An Han

That's an excellent question.

That's what everybody asks me.

How close flies are to humans?

In my opinion, they are really close to humans in many ways.

They do have a majority of genes that cause diseases.

And they are highly similar, those molecular functions.

But more importantly, the way that the brain works in full flies is quite similar to the way that our brain works.

Obviously, our brain is a lot more complex, but fly brain is also highly sophisticated in a way that they do most that we do.

They sleep, they eat well, they control their diet, they exercise, they have fun with alcohol.

So this is highly similar to human behavior as well, too.

It's because the way that their brain works is highly similar.

to humans.

So I think FlipFly is a really good model to study human brain, although there won't be some behaviors that can be exactly matching, but we can at least study fundamental mechanism, how brain control behavior and how anomaly in their brain function tend to cause diseases like autism or Alzheimer's diseases.

Right.

I stopped drinking coffee after four o'clock because I want to have a really good night's sleep.

Me too.

I know for sure if I drink coffee after dinner, I cannot sleep well because there will be caffeine in my system and loss of sleep can be really bad too.

So there will be a lot of side effects of having caffeine late at night, although there may be individual differences as well too.

I mean, you and I know that

the way that we behave is based on our experiences as well too, beyond genetic makeup.